A gift is a gift–it’s rude to agree to go along then change your mind and act all ungrateful about it. Imagine if he’d invested MORE than a bit of petrolgas on the journey!

*speaking from years of ingratitude tho*

[yes, it’s true that “forcing” someone to go through with a tradition, “because it’s a bloody tradition”, isn’t really a great gift, but Joyce DID blindly agree instead of asking about it and, instead of graciously saying, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t expect this,” but otherwise going along with it civilly, A SPLODED like the Old Testament God… It’s not really dickish to say, “You don’t even know what one’s like–just TRY it.”]

He’s a bit of an ass, yes. Should not force some into a ‘tradition’. And yeah, Joyce shouldn’t have exploded on learning what it was all about. But then, Joyce is not any more normal than Jason is, so…

Last panel, yeah I can’t really blame her for trying to put distance between her and the guy next to here…however, just how much help Jason would be is a good question.

Well, the Brits do have a reputation for sticking really strongly to their traditions. They still have the royal family, they still have tea-time, and they still have soldiers wearing those big poofy hats (the soldiers are elite badasses though so please do not insult the hats in their presence).

“Sticking really strongly to traditions) is as true of the US as it is of the UK. YOU PARDON A TURKEY! And, after all, Jason is doing an American tradition here, not a British one (If he were, Joyce would have been taken to a bar 3 years before this).

(We don’t really have “teatime” though. Unless you just mean a time of the day when we are drinking tea, in which case we have several of those each day.)

You say that like subjecting all of the US to six weeks or more of Christmas music per year isn’t a worse and crueller crime–at least Joyce initially was willing.

Jason strikes me more of the “everyone does it” crowd–okay, maybe he’s short of imagination, but I was subjected to the same thing and dismissed it *politely* as “not my thing” [no screaming and public degradation of a friend’s character involved]. Sometimes friends want to share their experiences, ya know??